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The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been

decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions

and sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they

are conscious of sharing with the less highly organized forms of

existence. But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of

the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained

savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve

them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming

at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine

instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic. As he

looked back upon man moving through history, he was haunted by a

feeling of loss. So much had been surrendered! and to such little

purpose!